This week Intel added a new employee to their ranks, and it was an unexpected announcement. Ryan Shrout, editor-in-chief at PC Perspective, co-founder of Shrout Research, and an industry veteran in hardware review circles, left his company and joined Intel as their Chief Performance Strategist. This is a newly-created role for Shrout at Intel, and it will mean that he’ll be responsible for, among other things, targeting performance profiles for Intel’s future products across their entire client computing segment.

In a post announcing his decision to leave the company, Shrout said that the offer from Intel came as a surprise, and that he’ll be leaving PC Perspective completely, as well as shutting down the consultancy company he started on the side to provide companies with third-party performance testing and marketing support to make their products more effective.

Many of you might want to know the why of my decision to leave behind the independent contracting and self-employment world and shift to working for Intel. For me, this isn’t a move dictated by finances (PC Perspective and Shrout Research were doing well). Nor is it one of external, negative pressure. Our team has weathered worse in both areas, and we would have done so again.

This move represents a new challenge and the chance to influence the direction of a major player in the technology field from within. The opportunity to work at a company with the legacy of Intel and be trusted with the scope of this role is humbling. It’s not often that this is presented, and after 19 years, I found the opportunity seemed like the right one, at the right time.

Not only does this career path provide a new challenge, but it also offers me the chance to create professional progress while allowing for more nights and mornings with my daughter – a significant personal plus for me.

Shrout’s position at Intel will be in the Client Computing Group, headed up by Gregory M. Bryant, which is part of the newly created Technology, Systems Architecture & Client Group (TSCG) under Intel’s Dr. Murthy Renduchintala. With the recent reorganisation of Intel’s initiatives for client computing that now need to align with new roadmaps for their foundry technology, as well as their newly reformed GPU department under Raja Koduri, there’s no backwards pressure within the company to help Intel plan and plot where they should be focusing on their performance deficits or issues that may affect client workloads. As Intel’s Chief Performance Strategist, Shrout will be responsible for assessing and evaluating the company’s products across the board.

During this week’s PC Perspective Podcast, Shrout appeared on the show and briefly talked about what he was probably going to be doing at the company.

The general idea of the role is that I am going to, kind of, help with the performance and competitive analysis groups across the Intel portfolio. Not just CPUs, but as they venture into GPUs, and storage, and other things like that. So it’s actually a really awesome opportunity, it wasn’t something that I was out looking for, it was something that I was approached about, and it took some convincing.

For example, people have been asking in the chat “Am I moving?”, “Which Intel office am I going to?”. I’m not moving, I’m actually going to stay here and commuting once a month to San Jose long term. There will be some initial ramp-up period where I’m out there for three of the first six months or some combination of that. Just to meet people and figure out the system. Keep in mind, I’ve never worked for a company before! I’ve never, I’ve been self-employed since I was 17 years old! And this will probably be a learning experience for me.

As a fan of the work that everyone does over at PC Perspective, it’s the end of an era for yet another long-running technical journalist that has gone to work for the company whose products they reviewed and tested for years. Anand Shimpi of Anandtech went to work for Apple, testing their product perfomance across their portfolio. Three years ago Scott Wasson, editor at The Tech Report, left his company to head up AMD’s performance testing groups internally. And now Shrout has gone to Intel to do the same.

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